Agoda vs Klook for hotels Bookings

Agoda

With Booking Holdings (parent of Booking.com) as their parent, it should come as no surprise that Agoda delivers a smooth and reliable experience when it comes to booking hotels. Agoda is originally created in Singapore, which means that they are very strong in South-east Asian markets, as well as Asia in general. Whilst they might not be a household name to Americans and Europeans, they are in fact the largest OTA in several Asian countries and have a strong reputation.

Like most of its competitors, Agoda offers both prepaid and pay-at-hotel options when booking. They also have an Agoda Secret Deals program, where you can book hotels at heavily discounted prices, however the name of the hotel won't be revealed until after you book. One way that they differ from some other competitors is that they let you add options like breakfast as you book, rather than asking you to select the conditions when choosing your room. The quality of their hotel reviews is not bad, however there are a significant amount in languages other than English, which won't be particularly helpful if you're not a native English speaker. When we tested their search functionality we got a lot of mixed results. For example at first we didn’t think that it supported searching by state/province, however it turns out they do but the results typically only show up if you search for something else – odd. Like its parent company Booking.com, Agoda offers a best price guarantee where they will refund the difference if you see a cheaper price on another site. As with all these guarantees, make sure you read the fine print carefully as they’ll only match the price when the booking meets certain conditions. We love Agoda’s search results page. There’s lots of images of each hotel on the page, and you can hover your cursor over them to see an enlarged version. This makes it so much easier to compare hotels without having to go into every one individually. If the COVID-19 pandemic has got you worried, Agoda has lots of useful information about what each hotel is doing on in individual level, for example whether or not they provide masks. You can check both Agoda’s own reviews as well as Booking.com’s reviews on the site, and for Agoda’s own reviews you can filter by room type to see more relevant reviews – something that Booking.com doesn’t offer. Unfortunately, Agoda doesn’t include the hotel replies, even for the Booking.com reviews. Agoda also offers video content for some top-selling hotels, and when we say video content what we actually mean is a slideshow of some of the better images, combined with some user reviews. It’s quite nice, although I don’t think it would make me any more likely to book the hotel. They’ve got a cool map feature where you can see the nearby attractions and shops as points on the map, but unfortunately it doesn’t really show enough information to actually be useful. Agoda also offer price alert functionality so you can keep informed if there’s a price drop. This feature is slowly becoming more common across online travel sites, but a lot still aren’t offering it. One thing that we really like about Agoda is that rather than just saying “Breakfast”, they give detailed information about what kind of breakfast is on offer. Similarly they give detailed information about the restaurants available at the hotel. Once thing we hate is on the payment page there’s a “Holding this price for 5 minutes” countdown, which can be extended by pressing the button. These kinds of pressure selling tactics are typically fake and leave a bad taste in user’s mouths.

As with the other major competitors, Agoda do not charge any kind of booking fee or credit card fee for bookings. The only exception is for Pay-at-hotel bookings, where the hotel may charge a credit card fee – the same as other competitors. From our own independent testing, we found Agoda’s pricing to be excellent, rating number 2 overall in our comparisons. While this was a comparison of properties worldwide, it is overall evident that Agoda’s best pricing can be found in Asia. Being associated with Booking.com however also gives them access to some strong pricing in Europe and the Americas.

From our own internal testing, availability on Agoda is excellent. It excels in South-east Asia and Asia in generally due to its own brand, and has strong coverage in Europe and the Americas, probable due to its relationship with Booking.com.

Hotels are Agoda’s main product, so as expected they are available through their iOS and Android mobile apps, their mobile website and their desktop website. Hotels can be booked in around 39 languages, so Agoda ranks very highly in this regard.

Besides Visa, Mastercard and American Express, Agoda also accepts a multiple other minor credit and debit cards including JCB, UnionPay, Discover and Diners. Besides cards, they also accept Paypal, as well as AfterPay for bookings in AUD. Overall, it has an above average number of payment methods, and a very smooth payment experience.

Agoda has quite a good reputation when it comes to hotels, so we wouldn’t hesitate to book a hotel through them. Their Trust Score on TrustPilot is 3.9/5.0 at the time of writing which isn’t fantastic, but it’s also not too bad for a OTA going through COVID-19. As always, carefully check that the conditions of your room are before booking, particularly the cancellation policies.

Agoda offers telephone support (via local phone numbers), online chat via their app as well as email support. However they don’t make most of these options easy to find – usually you’ll have to click a “Show more options” link in the help section. When booking a hotel with Agoda, all three options appear to be available, whereas they aren’t when you book flights with them.

Overall, we consider that Agoda is definitely worth checking out no matter in the world you want to book a hotel. Considering they seems to share a lot of hotel inventory with Booking.com, and that we found their prices to in fact be better than Booking.com, we highly recommend you compare prices here first before booking elsewhere.

Klook

Klook is a major player in the Attraction Tickets space across Asia, although they’re not widely known outside of the region. In recent years they’ve started a hotel booking feature as well, with great success. We’ve gone and checked out their hotel offering and were quite impressed overall. Read on to find our why you might want to consider using Klook for your next hotel booking.

It offers all the basic sorting and filtering functionality which you have come to expect, and searching seems to work well. As with most other OTAs, the majority of the rooms support free cancellation but there are also some that don’t, which are typically cheaper. There’s also some hotels which don’t support free cancellation at all but this is typically the policy of the hotel itself and not Klook.

As with most sites, the map functionality is a bit hit and miss. In terms of the maps for individual hotels it provides the location of a lot of surrounding attractions and has them clearly labelled, however for the transportation section, when checking the hotels in Manhattan it kept recommending me various helipads around the city rather than the airports which is probably what visitors want to know.

One thing we really loved is that it provides a really comprehensive breakdown of all the fees which you can expected to pay, including the deposit, any resort fee (if applicable), parking and breakfast charges. There’s also some basic information about the food and beverage offering available within the hotel, not all competitors offer this kind of information.

Klook provides guest reviews of each hotel, however it appears these all come from hotels.com. What we didn’t like it that although the hotel we were looking at apparently has 995 reviews, we could only check 20 of them. In addition, we couldn’t find many reviews which included photos.

Another cool little feature which Klook offers is the ability to refer-a-friend, quite common for newish ecommerce operations. When you invite friends they’ll get a $5USD promo code to start them off and you’ll get a $5 booking credit when they successfully make a booking.

Where Klook seems to be a bit lacking is in the total number of hotels that are available on it’s platform. For example when searching for a certain city, Klook had 113 results, Booking.com had 131, and Trip.com had 155. Having said that our search did return all the popular hotels, the difference with the other platforms being that they returned by hotels which are unknown or alternative types of accommodation. This of course will vary depending on where you’re traveling to but we’re confident that for the majority of trips this won’t make a huge amount of difference.

Not having been around for as long as some of the competitors like Hotels.com, Booking.com or Expedia, it doesn’t offer as many languages as some other choices. However it has a full range of English sites as well as the major Asian languages and the biggest European languages as well. Besides their desktop website, they also have mobile site as well as a mobile app available on both iOS and Android. And even if they don’t support your desired language, they accept payment in a huge range of currencies.

In terms of payment, Klook appears to accept all major credit and debit cards including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, UnionPay, Discover and Diners. It also accepts Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Alipay and in certain markets in accepts AfterPay as a Buy Now Pay Later option.

While Klook might be new in the hotel space, they’re very successful in terms of selling attraction tickets and are generally highly recommended. Since they are relatively new it’s difficult to say how reliable they are, but we personally wouldn’t hesitate to give them a go.

Klook customer service is a little difficult to find, but if you go to the help page there’s a small floating chat icon bubble that you can click on to launch their chat feature. As usual they try to answer your question first without connecting you to anybody, but once you get the option to talk to somebody we found that we never had to wait longer than 1 minute, and the staff seemed knowledgeable. We couldn’t find any options for phone or email support.

So overall, you’re probably wondering if it’s worth giving Klook a try for your next hotel booking. While I’m personally yet to try them, based on their great reputation for attraction tickets, pleasant user interface and excellent prices I don’t see any reason not to give them a try, in fact I’m going to try very soon. I can’t wait to see what Klook does going forward, as personally I think they have enormous potential if they keep going the way they are.